Playwrights Take Back Seat In Movies

On a stage, their word is law. They are automatically considered the primary creative source of a play, and nothing substantive is changed without their consent.

It doesn`t work that way in Hollywood. Screenplays -- including those based on stage plays -- generally go through a number of drafts, with input from studio chiefs, other writers, directors and editors.

Different playwrights deal with this situation in different ways. William Mastrosimone (Extremities), Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) and Marsha Norman (`night, Mother) stuck close to their work, writing the screenplays, spending time on the set, working closely with the director.

Mark Medoff tried to do the same, but he was fired from the production of his Children of a Lesser God when he clashed creatively with the director.

David Mamet, in contrast, completely ignored the adaptation of his Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The movie eventually was titled About Last Night . . ., and it bears little more than a passing resemblance to the original play.

``They don`t have to listen to anybody when they purchase the rights,`` said Mastrosimone, whose adaptation of Extremities opens later this month. So why was he so heavily involved? ``Burt Sugarman (the play`s producer) wanted to make a good movie.``

There`s the rub: Every producer wants to make a good movie. But some feel that fidelity to the original material isn`t necessarily the best way to do that.

``I tried to be true to the essence of the material,`` Randa Haines, director of the film version of Children of a Lesser God, told a symposium in Hollywood, Calif., not long ago. ``If you`re too true to the material, you can get stuck and have a photographed play.``

Haines said she rejected Medoff`s screenplay because she found it too sentimental. Ultimately, Haines decided to drop him from the project in favor of a writer ``who was more in sync with what I wanted to do.``

``We never felt our job was to make David`s play into a movie,`` said Stuart Oken, who produced About Last Night . . . with Jason Brett. ``Our job was to make a really good movie.``

Brett and Oken come from the theater; they produced Sexual Perversity at their Apollo Theatre Center in 1979. Around that same time, they purchased the movie rights.

From the beginning, they said, they knew the movie would have to be considerably different from the play -- an hourlong one-act some people have compared to a Jules Feiffer cartoon.

``The play did not provide a structure for a film,`` Oken said. ``There wasn`t enough story there. It didn`t have any of the classic elements of a screenplay.``

That being the case, the producers sat down with some writers to figure out what the play was about and what kind of movie they wanted to make. The play, they decided, was ``a dark but brilliant and scathing indictment of the sexual politics of the `70s.`` The movie, they decided shortly thereafter, would be something else altogether.

Essentially, the producers softened the material. The characters were made younger, which made their faults -- chiefly an inability to be emotionally intimate with one another -- seem more like a product of their inexperience than a basic flaw. Mamet`s characters are destined to remain children for their entire lives; these people could conceivably grow up and maybe even find happiness.

The producers vigorously defended these changes on artistic grounds, rebutting critics who claimed they simply made the material more commercial. Even so, their overall view of the singles scene is less bleak than Mamet`s, and it is their vision that ended up on celluloid.

Extremities also has been changed -- primarily in the addition of a sequence at the beginning, where the main character, Marjorie (Farrah Fawcett), is nearly raped in a parking garage. This is Mastrosimone`s concession to the dictum that a play, particularly one that takes place in a confined location, must be ``opened up`` for film. The rest of the film takes place in her house.

``It was not done by committee. I wrote it all, but I was affected by questions people asked me,`` Mastrosimone said.

Mastrosimone was happy with the final screenplay but, once shooting began, he found he had increasingly little influence. His clout was reduced to nothing when the footage went into the editor`s room.

``I love most of the movie,`` he said. ``I`m happy with it as far as it goes. But they cut out some real important stuff I wish people had seen.``

Despite his disappointing first film experience, Mastrosimone currently is working on a screen adaptation of his Nanawatai. ``My first girlfriend broke my heart, but that didn`t stop me (from pursuing others),`` he explained.

Medoff isn`t commenting at all on the movie made from his film. Neither is Mamet. He`s in Seattle -- directing his first film.